What's It Worth to You?

Jim Pennypacker is the CEO of Dance Communications, a custom publishing and thought leadership marketing company. Jim is the former Director of PM Solutions Center for Business Practices and the former Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of the Project Management Institute.

  ProjectsAtWork  

A five-step approach to determining if your project management initiatives are worth the investment.

In the past, most companies relied solely on ROI calculations to justify their project management initiatives. ROI is a quantifiable measurement that senior level management understands and appreciates. Financial measures alone, however, don't present a comprehensive picture of overall value. They are insufficient as either a gauge of success or a clear sign of future value.

Unlike financial measures, many performance measures have come to be viewed as leading indicators. When they improve, an improvement in the financials generally follows. So to drive success, financial measures must be supplemented with non-financial ones, such as those listed above, to present a balanced picture of actual value realized.

In today's unsettled economy, where every dollar counts, it is more critical than ever for organizations to validate and quantify the full strategic importance of project management to overall business success. Even for today's ROI-minded institutional investors, non-financial criteria constitute 35 percent of their investment decision (Christensen 2000). To measure the more broad - yet quantifiable - results of project management, more organizations are turning to a scorecard approach to measure both financial and non-financial results of project management …

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